The Aid Agencies and Their Devil's Bargains

In this season of generosity, of morality plays about Scrooge and the Grinch and the global imperative to help those who are less fortunate, think a moment about this question: what if your gift could relieve Tiny Tim's misery for now, but risked perpetuating it -- or even worsening it -- in the long run?

writes Michael Wines as he gives ammo to the "Trade, not aid" mantra.

This is no theoretical exercise, and there is no easy answer. Just this sort of dilemma is unfolding right now worldwide, in places like Zimbabwe. …

The United Nations and nonprofit charities with global reach are, as always, rushing to help. The World Food Program will distribute 331,000 metric tons of corn and other staples in Zimbabwe by 2007, nearly a third of all the donations it plans for southern Africa. The United Nations is building 2,500 shelters in Harare, the capital, to house the homeless.

Such generosity is welcome, but its subtext raises wrenching ethical issues. For in the view of critics, these humanitarian gestures will not simply save lives and ease misery, though they will surely do that. The critics say that the aid also will bolster Zimbabwe's authoritarian regime, which razed and burned the homes of those 700,000 citizens earlier this year, and commanded them to move into the countryside.

President Robert G. Mugabe calls the demolitions slum clearance. …

The world's aid to Zimbabweans is part of a devil's bargain, critics say: save the poor from hunger and exposure, but at the price of aiding the very rulers who are making them hungry and exposed in the first place.

Should such deals be struck? Implicitly and otherwise, they are struck all the time: In Darfur, relief organizations might be said to have aided the Sudanese government's ethnic cleansing merely by providing assistance to refugee camps set up by the victims of that cleansing. While refugees are fed and housed far away from their homes, the government can consolidate its hold on their former territory. …

Such moral dilemmas [as those regarding North Korea, Bosnia, and Rwanda] hardly overshadow the life-saving work that relief agencies perform. But the dilemmas are not trivial. Since the cold war ended, humanitarian responses to wars and political crises have mushroomed, sometimes supplanting more muscular diplomatic and military actions of years past. Sending aid, it seems, is easier, warmer and fuzzier than tackling the root problems that led to the crisis at hand.

As relief has become a preferred response to problems like refugee crises, dictators and warlords have become ever cannier at exploiting that aid. And the dilemmas have become more common and thornier. … Rarely, agencies do withhold assistance. After the Rwanda genocide of the mid-1990's, the International Rescue Committee pulled its workers out of refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo after concluding that soldiers behind the genocide were using the camps to regroup for further attacks. …

In almost every case, agencies swallow hard and offer help anyway, arguing that the greater good of saving lives and reducing suffering outweighs the ignominy of being a handmaiden to oppression. The real question, perhaps, is how that ignominy might be held to a minimum.

One option, experts say, is for relief agencies to publicize their devil's bargains -- to show the world how such blackmail works, and potentially to shame those responsible for it. Another is to press wrongdoers, publicly and in private, to stop rights abuses that humanitarians can document. Relief agencies have historically been loath to do that for fear that angry governments will bar them from helping victims of the abuses. …

In Zimbabwe, for example, the World Food Program and the United Nations Development Program have said little about the constraints imposed on them. But top United Nations humanitarian and housing envoys have been scathingly critical of Mr. Mugabe's slum-demolition program and have demanded that relief agencies be given wider leeway to aid its victims.

Humanitarian organizations can also be subversive. Even if they are sharply limited in their own efforts, relief workers can strike quiet alliances with local activists, leverage their influence with sympathetic government insiders and educate those they are helping about their rights.